July 1, 2016 AT 7:00 am

We started the day by wrapping a Pi Zero and camera module in excessive amounts of electrical tape and sticking it to Ben’s 250-class racing drone. Sounds cool huh? Not only did it work amazingly well, it didn’t impact the performance of the quad at all. Pretty good for a 1 GHz fully featured Linux box!

As you can see from the image above, the camera module was orientated so as to get a birds eye view from the drone’s perspective. The two ‘ears’ sticking up are the antennae of the drone itself and the red one at the back is for the FPV.

The Pi was setup to record from the camera on boot, which caused some interesting problems when attempting to debug the software, because the preview from raspivid (that we’d forgotten to disable) was blocking us from seeing the GUI! Development cycles increased from 10s to at least 10 minutes, per cycle.

Before setting out for our first flight, we deemed it sensible to fill ourselves with confidence by consuming large amounts of cake.

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